Is this project an undergraduate, graduate, or faculty project?
Undergraduate
Project Type
group
Campus
Daytona Beach
Authors' Class Standing
Kassidy Myers, Benjamin Katz, Sophomore Bailey Wolf, Anthony Fabrega, William Punches
Lead Presenter's Name
Benjamin Katz
Lead Presenter's College
DB College of Arts and Sciences
Faculty Mentor Name
Dr. Saida Caballero-Nieves
Abstract
TESS Study of Wolf-Rayet Stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars are massive and rare stars whose evolution is mainly changed by stellar winds or binary interactions. In a lot of cases, WR stars are found in binary systems with a companion star, often an O-type star, which can help astronomers find the mass and other properties of the WR star. The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), located about 50 kpc from the Milky Way, has a lower metallicity than the Milky Way which makes it a useful place to study Wolf-Rayet stars. For this project, we will study the WR population of the LMC using data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The goal is to determine which systems are confirmed binaries, candidate binaries, or likely non-binaries. Each target is checked for nearby sources that could cause blending in the TESS pixels, and stars that may need deblending are flagged before extracting and analyzing the light curves. These light curves are used to train a supervised machine learning algorithm that looks for photometric signatures of binarity or variability in the time-series data. This work is still in progress and aims to test whether TESS photometry can be used to identify WR binaries in the LMC and help expand studies of variability in massive stars.
Did this research project receive funding support (Spark, SURF, Research Abroad, Student Internal Grants, Collaborative, Climbing, or Ignite Grants) from the Office of Undergraduate Research?
No
Included in
Instrumentation Commons, Physical Processes Commons, Stars, Interstellar Medium and the Galaxy Commons
TESS Study of Wolf-Rayet Stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud
TESS Study of Wolf-Rayet Stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars are massive and rare stars whose evolution is mainly changed by stellar winds or binary interactions. In a lot of cases, WR stars are found in binary systems with a companion star, often an O-type star, which can help astronomers find the mass and other properties of the WR star. The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), located about 50 kpc from the Milky Way, has a lower metallicity than the Milky Way which makes it a useful place to study Wolf-Rayet stars. For this project, we will study the WR population of the LMC using data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The goal is to determine which systems are confirmed binaries, candidate binaries, or likely non-binaries. Each target is checked for nearby sources that could cause blending in the TESS pixels, and stars that may need deblending are flagged before extracting and analyzing the light curves. These light curves are used to train a supervised machine learning algorithm that looks for photometric signatures of binarity or variability in the time-series data. This work is still in progress and aims to test whether TESS photometry can be used to identify WR binaries in the LMC and help expand studies of variability in massive stars.